In the long run...
we are all dead anyway - Maynard Keynes
1) To walk out of a discussion just because you do not like the context is silly. One can challenge the context and take part in the discussion.
2) To be honest I suspect whatever we do about global warming it will be too little too late, this will be self limiting if only because the behaviour and structures that cause the problem are unlikely to survive the changes introduced by the problem. There are a few historical examples of civilisations collapsing because of self introduced environment changes... ours will be just a somewhat larger example.
What is a little bothering is that everyone one is trying to stop the heavy roller by standing in the way, when probably the more sensible thing is get out of the way and pick up the pieces afterwards.
3) To say that there have been no casualties produced by the of Nuclear power is to ignore both Cheronobyl and some of the observations of the UKs H&S Executive.
Nuclear power has two major problems...
a) Actual costs.
The decommissioning of the old British reactors is proving to be a lot more expensive than originally envisaged. Many estimates of costs factor this out, if this factor is included things do not look so attractive to bean counters. (BNF receive a rather lot of Government cash to cover these costs otherwise their financial position would be untenable) A further factor is liability, most failures have been due human factors, the cost of covering the possibility of large number of large claims in the event of failure is rather difficult to estimate. When Nuclear Plants do go pear shaped they do it big time. Most people build Electrical plants to make money, the Nuclear Industry has not been healthy for some time because for some reason people are a bit wary of the big bill at the end (if they can get someone else to pick up the tab e.g. tax payer they are very happly to build)..
b) Security risk
Terrorist threat is probably not really an issue, to breach the containment requires access to much more powerful weapons that those available to most terrorist groups.
Of more concern is the impact of a conventional military strike, a study in Scientific American (or possibly New Scientist) 20 years ago indicated that in the right conditions a single conventional strike on a Nuclear Plant could render large chunks of Northern Europe untenable for a very long time. A nuclear plant is potentially dirtier than a conventional Nuclear Weapon.
As fusion Power research currently uses very powerful magnetic bottles to contain matter, the possible impact of the failure of the bottle is not difficult to imagine. When they go wrong Fusion is likely to go bang, and fission just goes fizz .... lethally...
The environment polution issue is tricky, some petroleum products have to be disposed with the Nuclear Waste in Nuclear Plants because the natural radioactivity exceeds that of the guidelines. There are some parts of the UK which have a fairly high background radiation (something to do with Granite and beta radiation I believe) .
Biting the hand that feeds IT
